“Over the past decade, scientists estimate that Mexican gillnet and longline fisheries have killed over 2,000 endangered North Pacific Ocean loggerheads a year. Bycatch reached a record high last July, when a mass mortality event left 483 loggerheads stranded on just one stretch of beach – a 600 percent increase over previous years’ averages. This extraordinarily high level of bycatch cannot be sustained and may ultimately drive this endangered sea turtle population to extinction.” [news release]

In an interview earlier this week, Sarah Uhlemann, a senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, said the surge in deaths of loggerheads is enough to invoke the “Pelly Amendment,” which allows the U.S. to sanction any country that violates the treaty. In the next several years, a ban on imports of certain Mexican seafood products could be instituted by the U.S Commerce Department if government agencies find that the loggerhead bycatch has not been addressed.

Photo: Mike Tork, NOAA

For the moment, as we reported earlier this week, Mexican officials — at least publicly — don’t seem inclined to press for turtle protection. On April 30, senior Mexican officials challenged years of peer-reviewed studies demonstrating that the recent spike in loggerhead deaths in the region was from gillnets set on the bottom off the Pacific coast. They were quoted in Mexican newspapers as saying that toxic algae blooms could be to blame.